Crafting. Discussion.

Chief Web Engineer

We are pleased to announce that we’re about to implement the craft system. Our team has been working on the balance and logic of crafting for a long time, crafting system was often changed and processed, and now we’d like to share some details about the updated system. Below you will find a detailed description of the crafting system, which will be of interest for everyone who likes crafting in games. If you don’t like creating the game items with your own hands, feel free to skip this step!

Obtaining

Traditionally, crafting begins when player obtains some crafting ingredients. In the world of the Genom, several types of resources can be obtained from different sources in a variety of ways. At the same time, each resource type has an alternative way of obtaining it. You can get obtain resources by:

Manually collecting them (pluck a flower, pick up a stone, disassemble a mechanism).

Exploiting surface deposits with a special tool (exploiting a pile of ore, a cloud of gas, a thicket of plants)

Extracting them from the planet with the help of a drilling rig

Process fallen creatures’ carcasses with the help of special tools (remove the skin from a Trog, chitin from a Locust, teeth from a Hound)

Exchanging available resources for the needed ones, bargaining with the NPC or other players

Splitting resources (to get the essence)

Studying

In addition to resources, item crafting also requires this item blueprint. Blueprints can be obtained from other players, purchased from the NPC, they can drop from several opponents, be a reward for quests or events or simply found in the world. Player should use the blueprint in inventory to study it and the acquired knowledge will forever be retained by the character. Every blueprint can be studied up to ten times. With each new study of the same blueprint, player can increase chances for a successful crafting.

Each blueprint bears a general item outline and is not bound to this item’s quality. All the knowledge necessary to create an item of a specific quality is contained in one blueprint, and therefore, crafting of the Legendary or Improved Marauder Pistol, players will require only one general scheme of the Marauder pistol.

Preparing

Most of the game items will be created on stationary crafting terminals of different. The higher the level, the greater the chance of creating a high-quality item. There are five levels of terminal quality in the game.

In settlements, players will be able to find terminals of quality levels from 1 to 3. Terminal in the player’s hangar can be improved up to the level 4. The terminal on the Syndicate Base can be upgraded up to the highest 5th level.

In addition to more advanced terminals, to achieve the best performance in crafting, players will need to unlock and level up crafting branches, same as with weapon or armor skills. As it is with weapons, player will unlock different nodes in the crafting tree by spending points, opening new possibilities, increasing the chance of successful crafting, and getting higher quality items.

Crafting Itself

When the player has gathered all the necessary resources and studied the blueprint, the craft terminal must be activated.

Absolutely every item contains 8 basic slots that must be filled and one optional slot. There are five slots for main resources, two of which require a specific type of resource, and the other three slots can be filled with any resource of the player’s choice. Three main slots can be filled with the essence, one of which will require the particular type of resource essence, and the two remaining are filled with any essence of the player’s choice.

The ninth optional slot is needed for a special resource — Arcanium. It serves as a catalyst and increases the chances of successful crafting. Arcanium will be a rare resource that players can find in the world by chance or interaction with environment.

Each resource can have one of 3 qualities, namely: Normal, Good, Perfect.

Each resource has its own Qualitative Indicator (hereinafter referred to as QI). This information will be indicated on each resource in the characteristics section.

Each blueprint has a potential for crafting any of the six qualities of the item. Therefore, each blueprint has the QI ranges for each quality of the created item. For example, when crafting the Spectrum Pistol, the following QI will be listed in its blueprint: 2,4,9,16,45,111 (in accordance with the 6 possible Pistol qualities).

Essence acts as a regulating "currency" that doesn’t affect the crafting outcome in any way, but at the same time it is obligatory. Therefore, further we will talk about 5 starting points (5 slots filled with resources, not the resources essence), affecting chances of the item crafting.

Once all the crafting attempt conditions are met, the player can finally press the button and try to craft an item.

The first thing that player encounters by doing so is the crafting chance. It depends on a number of factors:

Basic crafting chance (30%)

Level of the used crafting terminal (4-20%, 4% for each level)

Level of blueprint study (3% -30%, 3% for each study of the drawing)

"Chance to create..." skill level (2% -20%, 2% for each skill level)

Arcanium (20%)

Totally we have a 120% chance of crafting. This is done so that the player has an opportunity to achieve a 100% crafting chance in different ways.

Suppose that luck is on the player's side and the item is crafted. After this, the second formula is implemented. It determines the quality of the future item.

With all the 5 slots filled, the game will display average QI of the resources. This will serve as the first fundamental indicator determining the item quality.

If the average QI of the added resources falls within ∓ 20% of some quality specified in the QI blueprint, this quality becomes the target one. Player has the maximum 61% chance of creating this target quality. The other qualities get a much lesser chance of crafting, up to 1%. At the same time, player always has a chance to create an un-targeted quality of the object. Even crafting the seemingly "Normal" Spectrum Pistol, there is a chance to craft the Legendary one. It's also worth remembering that the higher the skill is, for example, the "Lucky Armorer", the higher the chances of getting higher qualities of the item, and the lower the chance to get low qualities.

Suppose that fortune smiled again, and the item received a rare quality. But what are the item parameters?

We have prepared the third formula that counts all the parameters. The decisive factor is how many time the invested resources "hit" the item’s QI. If the player used resources with a large spread of QI, most likely there will be no more than one or two matches. If the player used resources of approximately the same quality and with approximately the same QI indicators, there might be 5 matches. And the more matches there is, the higher the parameters of the received object will be.

It is worth remembering that the QI is only a conditional qualitative indicator, and the formulas use ranges without strict binding to a specific number. For example, in the third formula, a "hit" means any time when the resource indicator lies within the crafted item QI range ∓10%.

Bonuses

Of course, we shouldn’t forget that the better the item, the more bonus features it has. This rule applies to the crafted items as well. If an item is crafted, the player receives these bonuses and in some cases even chooses which bonuses to apply. For example, by creating an object that has 4 bonus parameters, 2 parameters will be automatically chosen, and 2 will be chosen by the players from list of possible remaining parameters. Thus, we expand customization possibilities for crafted items.

Summing Up

Making the crafting process interesting and the result diverse was our primary goal. We changed many features of the crafting system being influenced by your discussions on our forums, and we’d be very glad to hear your thoughts on these new features once again. What would you like to see in this system? What should we improve? What aspects, in your opinion, can cause problems? We’re waiting for your feedback.

We’d also like to point out that our team has created this material to help all the players get acquainted with the general concept of crafting. Some specific features or conditions, as well as the numerical parameters indicated in this material may change by the time the craft system is introduced or during its testing.

Alien Scientist

If the average QI of the added resources falls within ∓ 20% of some quality specified in the QI blueprint, this quality becomes the target one. Player has the maximum 61% chance of creating this target quality. The other qualities get a much lesser chance of crafting, up to 1%.

Raider

Hmmm...
I´m a bit sceptic about the "need" to gain the same blueprint 10(!!) times. Seems a bit much in my opinion.
Sure, if blueprints have a ~5% chance of dropping it´s no issue but i´m pretty sure there will be blueprints with 0,001% chance as well. Good luck getting 10 of those.

Idea: You can study the weapon you made. Kind of like "trying to figure out how to make it better".
The above model gives 3% per blueprint.
Let´s make analysing a normal weapon 1%, good 2% and perfect 3%. It´ll still be work to gather the materials and all but not as boring as killing the same mob a thousand times to get 3%.
Of course the item should be gone after analysing it.

Resident Of Avalon

To be able to discuss it better: what are your vision about the end-game? Do you want an EvE Online like end game (the best item can be aquired via crafting however the crafting some items need a cooperation of a complete alliance) or a standard MMO like end game (the best gear can be found in dungeons / instances).

Raider

Personally i would *love* the EVE approach but i think going the EVE way is not what the devs want, at least not all the way.
I always thought it would be great to get crafting material in dungeons that aren´t anywhere else in the world but that would have the downside of players that don´t like crafting, having to wait for the ones gathering the materials they are interested in. Maybe a chest in the end? Although that would kill immersion...
Overall, i´m not a fan of "run that dungeon 500 times to get the equip to get to the next dungeon so you can raid that one 500 times" and so on. It would be great if dungeons had another purpose than just getting to the endboss to get some loot.

But back to crafting: yes, i like it a bit more complex. Not the kind of complex Repopulation is having though, that´s over the top, if you happen to know that game. What i read so far about PG crafting seems okay. Bit more than just click and done, less than forging even the glue to hold stuff together. Only part i´m worried about are those blueprints - for now.
And yes, i think crafted stuff should be at least the same or, even better, slightly above the stuff you find in dungeons. Makes crafting viable.